Bowlich's Land of LinksShaared links2018-08-17T09:09:55-07:00http://bowlich.com/http://bowlich.com/http://bowlich.com/ShaarliDear Googles: I hope you're giving a lot of hard thought to Brownshirt-proofi...http://bowlich.com/?6eUwog2018-08-17T09:09:55-07:002018-08-17T09:09:55-07:00

I'm going to suggest a different tack: Start building systems that are under direct user control, or which have a federated distribution of data such that there is no single global point of attack against all users.
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So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.
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That’s no longer true. My younger colleague @puellavulnerata observes that for a long time, there were only weird nerds, but when our traditional pursuits (programming, electrical engineering, computer games, &c) became a route to career stability, nerdiness and its surface-level signifiers got culturally co-opted by trend-chasers who jumped on the style but never picked up on the underlying substance that differentiates weird nerds from the culture that still shuns them. That doesn’t make them “fake geeks,” boy, girl, or otherwise — you can adopt geek interests without taking on the entire weird-nerd package — but it’s still an important distinction. Indeed, the notion of “cool nerds” serves to erase the very existence of weird nerds, to the extent that many people who aren’t weird nerds themselves only seem to remember we exist when we commit some faux pas by their standards.
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The Telnet BBS Guide is the largest active listing of Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems on the Internet! We list a total of 440 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.
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nother week, another paywall. This time, it’s Bloomberg, which announced that it would be adding a comprehensive paywall to its news service and television channel (except TicToc, its media partnership with Twitter). A paywall was hardly a surprise, but what was surprising was the price: the standard subscription is $35 a month (up from $0 a month), or $40 a month including access to online and print editions of Businessweek.

This essay explores the ways Facebook transforms our attention into a product, and how that transformation changes us. It then proposes a social media strike as a concrete strategy to reclaim our attention, and finally lists many reasons we should all quit Facebook.
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]]>👓 It's Time For an RSS Revival | Wiredhttp://bowlich.com/?ZSso-A2018-04-02T12:27:40-07:002018-04-02T12:27:40-07:00

This article, which I’ve seen shared almost too widely on the internet since it came out, could almost have been written any time in the past decade really. They did do a somewhat better job of getting quotes from some of the big feed readers’ leaders to help to differentiate their philosophical differences, but there wasn’t much else here. Admittedly they did have a short snippet about Dave Winer’s new feedbase product, which I suspect, in combination with the recent spate of articles about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, motivated the article. (By the way, I love OPML as much as anyone could, but feedbase doesn’t even accept the OPML feeds out of my core WordPress install though most feed readers do, which makes me wonder how successful feedbase might be in the long run without better legacy spec support.)
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For Adorno, popular culture is not just bad art – it enslaves us to repetition and robs us of our aesthetic freedom
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]]>This Isn’t About Social Media. This is About Control.http://bowlich.com/?0jG_1w2018-02-19T11:38:41-07:002018-02-19T11:38:41-07:00

Our histories, our sense of belonging to the narrative we create, is under constant revision. Facebook and Twitter took away linear history from us. We don’t see our participation, we see our contributions, and only if they’re popular enough with our peers (and therefore, advertisers) to generate traffic.
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Facebook has created a centrally designed internet. It’s a lamer, shittier looking internet. It’s just not as cool as an internet that is a big, chaotic space filled with tons of independently operating websites who are able to make a living because they make something cool that people want to see.
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The tech industry is having a moment of reflection. Even Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook are talking openly about the downsides of software and algorithms mediating our lives. And while calls for regulation have been met with increased lobbying to block or shape any rules, some people around the industry are entertaining forms of self regulation. One idea swirling around: Should the programmers and data scientists massaging our data sign a kind of digital Hippocratic oath?
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]]>Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disruptedhttp://bowlich.com/?he4S2A2018-02-09T10:14:26-07:002018-02-09T10:14:26-07:00

Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We love our nifty phones and just-a-click-away services, but these behemoths enjoy unfettered economic domination and hoard riches on a scale not seen since the monopolies of the gilded age. The only logical conclusion? We must bust up big tech.
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Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
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]]>Announcing “Project Things” - An open framework for connecting your devices to the web. - The Mozilla Bloghttp://bowlich.com/?9QgQdw2018-02-06T10:31:40-07:002018-02-06T10:31:40-07:00

We have provided a full walkthrough of how to get started on building your own private smart home using a Raspberry Pi. You can view the complete walkthrough here.
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Today we are bombarded with information that has been created, ,managed, or manipulated by the unseen hand of corporations, people, governments, and cabals if you want to believe that. It is up to the consumer to do the leg work and discover what is truth, but unfortunately for the masses it seems, the truth is just subject to their own cognitive dissonance. In 2018 we are about to embark on a new roller coaster of disinformation and active measures not only perpetrated by Russia and other actors, but ourselves. How do we really fight that power?
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]]>GNU social: Federation against the social model of Twitterhttp://bowlich.com/?jm0X8g2018-01-30T20:14:44-07:002018-01-30T20:14:44-07:00

“Federation issues” may look like a “bug”, but they are really the result of an agreement, an implicit contract: to be part of a conversation on another node, I first have to have received the trust of someone who is taking part in it.
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A large global change in data protection law is about to hit the tech industry, thanks to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). GDPR affects any company, wherever they are in the world, that handles data about European citizens. It becomes law on 25 May 2018, and as such includes UK citizens, since it precedes Brexit. It’s no surprise the EU has chosen to tighten the data protection belt: Europe has long opposed the tech industry’s expansionist tendencies, particularly through antitrust suits, and is perhaps the only regulatory body with the inclination and power to challenge Silicon Valley in the coming years.
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]]>Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again | The Outlinehttp://bowlich.com/?QTaDng2018-01-25T16:54:36-07:002018-01-25T16:54:36-07:00

Having been on the service for nine months myself, I can confirm Mastodon is not a replacement for Twitter. It’s much better. It is the first place on the internet where I have felt comfortable in a long time.
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]]>Growing apart and losing touch is human and healthyhttp://bowlich.com/?dfH_4A2018-01-25T13:44:49-07:002018-01-25T13:44:49-07:00

What allowed me to change and prosper was the freedom to grow apart and lose touch with people. It’s hard to change yourself if you’re stuck in the same social orbit. There’s a gravitational force that pulls you into repeating the same circular pattern over and over again. Breaking out of that takes tremendous force.
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]]>‘Never get high on your own supply’ – why social media bosses don’t use social media | Media | The Guardianhttp://bowlich.com/?_vtO4g2018-01-25T13:31:42-07:002018-01-25T13:31:42-07:00

Developers of platforms such as Facebook have admitted that they were designed to be addictive. Should we be following the executives’ example and going cold turkey – and is it even possible for mere mortals?
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]]>flowerhack | The Internet I Knewhttp://bowlich.com/?tS0hXQ2017-12-30T18:59:17-07:002017-12-30T18:59:17-07:00

We... we had ad-free social networking in 2004. It was called "one of your friends got a Dreamhost and put some forum software on it and everyone hung out there." If the website got really big and popular, maybe the owner would ask for donations from the users, and usually folks would give enough to keep the place afloat, because everyone wanted to keep hanging out there.
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]]>flowerhack | Drinking from the Information Firehose: A New Approachhttp://bowlich.com/?IlKA9A2017-12-30T18:56:03-07:002017-12-30T18:56:03-07:00

Something I've struggled with more and more these days is keeping up with all the stuff there is to read on the internet. Every day, there's an update from a friend's blog, or a cool article on a tech news site, or a post from my favorite blogger… I wind up letting myself get interrupted by all these irresistible information-trinkets, trying to skim each article quickly so I can move on to the next one, and searching for more once I've finished all my skimming, hungry for yet more little factoids.
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POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site.
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December 15, 2017 will be marked in history as the day AOL Instant Messenger finally died, and with it, a chapter of my online fandom lays to rest.
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]]>Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fearhttp://bowlich.com/?Kfur4A2017-12-18T15:29:22-07:002017-12-18T15:29:22-07:00

This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility. Musk isn’t necessarily worried about the rise of a malicious computer like Skynet from The Terminator. Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields. Thus, in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.
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]]>Firefox is on a slippery slope | Drew DeVault’s Bloghttp://bowlich.com/?TAI4Cw2017-12-16T12:05:52-07:002017-12-16T12:05:52-07:00

For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.

How can you live the life you want to, avoiding the distractions and manipulations of others? To do so, you need to know how you work. “Know thyself”, the Ancients urged. Sadly, we are often bad at this.
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]]>Facebook Can’t Cope With the World It’s Created – Foreign Policyhttp://bowlich.com/?ivAt-A2017-11-26T11:09:56-07:002017-12-04T16:59:43-07:00

]]>We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself - The New York Timeshttp://bowlich.com/?ZjqzSQ2017-11-20T10:14:05-07:002017-11-20T10:14:05-07:00

I led Facebook’s efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse. As the world contemplates what to do about Facebook in the wake of its role in Russia’s election meddling, it must consider this history. Lawmakers shouldn’t allow Facebook to regulate itself. Because it won’t.
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For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. It is a great way to read blogs and the backbone of podcast distribution. As social networks took off, a lot of my friends that were previously big RSS fans gave up on the technology and instead relied upon sources like Twitter and Facebook to get their news.
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Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed to the internet before 2005 or so, and may be all-but-forgotten for many others, obscured by the last 10 years of relentless internet development, but before mass social media platforms and amazing business opportunities on the internet, it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online.
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]]>Facebook and Google Are Actually 'Net States.' And They Rule the World | WIREDhttp://bowlich.com/?UbrBPg2017-11-05T13:02:27-07:002017-11-05T13:02:27-07:00

“We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” So declared MIT professor David D. Clark in 1992. Twenty-five years later, this sentiment mirrors the global zeitgeist more than ever. The American public distrusts government in record numbers. Other nation-states disdain the US to world-historical degrees. A non-nation-state, Facebook, just topped 2 billion users—more than a quarter of the world’s population, surpassing even China’s population by almost 40 percent. In short, nation-states are not the only game in town anymore.
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IN 1962 a British political scientist, Bernard Crick, published “In Defence of Politics”. He argued that the art of political horse-trading, far from being shabby, lets people of different beliefs live together in a peaceful, thriving society. In a liberal democracy, nobody gets exactly what he wants, but everyone broadly has the freedom to lead the life he chooses. However, without decent information, civility and conciliation, societies resolve their differences by resorting to coercion.

When future historians of videogames come to write their accounts of the 2010s, I sincerely hope that they don't forget to mention the creativity, artistry and innovation that has blossomed in this decade - but I already know that won't be the main focus of the chapter.
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]]>The ESRB Is Wrong About Loot Boxes And Gamblinghttp://bowlich.com/?ymYcoA2017-10-15T18:58:15-07:002017-10-15T18:58:15-07:00

]]>'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The Guardianhttp://bowlich.com/?z3zXLg2017-10-14T21:55:56-07:002017-10-14T21:56:36-07:00

Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.
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